Wondering how to translate Captivate course files? There are two approaches to translating your Adobe Captivate project modules. One is more costly and takes more time than the other.

Online education has taken the world by storm and is changing the very way we learn. Your development of an eLearning course is smart in terms of scalability and the audiences you can reach.

In this post, we will help you down the path of least resistance by explaining both options for how to translate Captivate course files.

Whether you create Captivate eLearning courses for profit or you develop them as part of an internal employee training program, our advice will help you successfully translate your online learning project.

Continue reading to learn your two main options for how to translate Captivate course files. Then, get our recommendation for the easiest and quickest way possible to translate a voice-over for multilingual narration, subtitles/captions and more.

How to Translate Captivate Course Files: 2 Options

As we mentioned earlier, there are two main options for how to translate Captivate course files. This includes translating (or creating) the narrative voice-over in a foreign language, as well as the reference materials, subtitles, captions, etc.

Let’s explore your two options for how to translate Adobe Captivate files:

1. Hire a Professional Translator

If you want to know how to translate Captivate courses that you’re going to sell to consumers, the best way is to hire professional translator. This is perhaps the most obvious way to translate a voice-over, dubbing, subtitles and learning materials for a high quality standard.

However, this doesn’t come without significant expense. You might also be waiting quite some time to receive a translated Captivate voice-over, dubbing, etc. This of course depends on who you hire for the job, but it can be time consuming to find a professional translator skilled in the source language and target language pair.

What’s more, if your educational material is highly specialized, you will need to seek out a specialized human translator.

For instance, let’s say you’re teaching an online course in something technical such as computer programming.

This means you’ll need to find a professional translator who has experience in programming, as well as your target and source languages.

If you would like to translate Captivate course files quickly and with minimal financial expense, continue reading.

2. Use Premium Translation Software

If you want to know how to translate Captivate course files and your online classes are only going to face internally (or you just don’t mind the sound of a synthetic voice for your dubbing or voice-over), opt for translation software.

Why Use Premium Translation Software
Language translation software will not only help with translating your Captivate narrative script file, but certain translation platforms (they’re the premium ones) can actually simultaneously translate your script and generate translated voice-overs from it.

This text-to-speech translation can happen within seconds, saving you time and money while helping you distribute your global e-learning course earlier. This software can also translate your students’ downloadable course materials such as reference guides, worksheets and more.

When you upload your Captivate course files to a premium translation platform, you can invite your translator to make edits right within the platform. If the system includes translation memory technology, it will save the edits and store them for automatically populating future translations.

This is helpful for translating multiple files and future courses, saving you time and continuously improving translation quality. Note that you can’t get premium features like these from free online translation tools, so you’ll need to use premium translation software.

Need a recommendation for translation software that creates voice-overs, dubbing, subtitles and files in other languages? Continue reading.

The Best Software for Translating Captivate Course Files

The best software for translating Captivate files is Pairaphrase.

Pairaphrase is web-based translation software that you can access online from anywhere in the world. Also, it’s best way to translate Captivate course files quickly and affordably.

How to Translate Captivate Files with Pairaphrase:

1. In Captivate, go to File>Export
2. Choose the files you need to translate (Project Captions, Closed Captions, etc.)
3. Create a Pairaphrase account
4. Batch upload the Captivate-exported files into Pairaphrase
5. Click ‘Translate’
6. Invite a human translator into Pairaphrase to edit the translations for higher quality*
7. Download the files
8. For text-to-speech output, go to the file in Active Documents and click the gear icon
9. Import the files to Captivate

Important Note About Machine Translation
*Note that we suggest you invite bilingual subject expert to edit your translations within Pairaphrase, since machine translation technology is nowhere near as accurate as human translation. Regardless of which translation software you choose!

Pairaphrase will use a combination of machine translation and translation memory to translate the bulk of the files for you. This makes it so that you don’t need to pay a human translator to translate every single word. However, this should be considered a first draft.

Pairaphrase doesn’t only translate voice-overs, captions and subtitles for you—it also translates 24 different types of files and makes them available to you in their original format. This is convenient for any type of reference materials you need to make available to your global students.

Now that you know how to translate Captivate course files, get started with Pairaphrase today!